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28 May 2006

Demonstrations

Demonstrations again yesterday. We saw groups of people meeting in various parks around town, but we didn't go down by the square. The military had planned a parade for the same day, but they changed it to Monday, so there weren't any conflicts.

It sounds like there were a similar number of people there as the one on April, or slightly less. Actually, the biggest difference between April's and May's was the government's reaction. The government was considerably less worked up about this one and I think that made a huge difference in people's perception of it.

I was glad to see the government has been calmer about demonstrations. I personally disagreed with this article that said that demonstrations were contributing to instability in the country (actually, I thought most of the article was great and just disagreed with that one part). Certainly there have been demonstrations that have been problems. And the road-closing isn't helpful (but that's illegal, isn't it?). But these large, peaceful demonstrations are not causing instability nor crippling the government. The government had been crippling itself with its unreasonable response to the demonstrations and I'm glad to see they didn't respond the same way this month.